Dirda, who refers to Tanselle as the “leading authority on all matters bibliographical, the greatest American textual scholar since Fredson Bowers,” explains the book as “a superb work of scholarly investigation, broad enough to touch on the development of blurbs, the artists involved in early cover design and the need for accurate description of dust jackets in library catalogues.”

Another review by the Book Patrol blog posted yesterday says the book “provides a thorough history of a books most valuable friend and can easily prove useful for the bookseller, book collector or any lover of books.”

Illustrated with sections containing black-and-white and color plates, this new book offers a concise history of publishers’ detachable book coverings while surveying their use by publishers and their usefulness to scholars as sources for biography, bibliography, and cultural analysis. It contains a list of surviving pre-1901 examples of British and American publishers’ printed book-jackets and constitutes a plea for the preservation and cataloguing of this significant class of material.